A Beast of a Thing

In an emotional confession sent via email to a former professor, I once remarked that writing fiction was really just learning to carefully craft your lies. She responded, dismissive sarcastic tone apparent even in the black type of the email, We both know it’s not that simplistic. But I’ve been thinking lately that it is, that writing is nice little paradox of the most perfect lies and truths sitting comfortably together staring back at us, challenging us to distinguish between the two. In a simpler analogy, it’s a lot like those deceptive gender shows Maury Povich hosts where the crowd stands and dances and screeches out “Man!” “Woman!” while one, other or both prances down the middle catwalk. Except instead of beautiful drag queens in false eyelashes and sequined gowns, you’ve got truth and lies in the same.

Perhaps that doesn’t make sense. Writing doesn’t make sense. I went to a birthday party last night hosted by a woman I barely know but much admire. First, the menu. She’s a born and bred Memphis girl, and to honor the city she loves she smoked meat for thirteen hours and demonstrated the proper way to eat real barbeque. New Orleans thinks that it barbecues, but it really just grills, and while both have their merits, they’re fundamentally different. She also served Muffalletas, which if you have not come to New Orleans and eaten you have not yet lived, although this variety was served vegetarian.

Most of the people attending were either writers or avid readers or both, and I noticed how comically singular the separate conversations were. The difficulty of a blessing, the demands of facing a blank page, how thankful we were to cry in front of our computers every day. But inevitably, meeting fabulously wonderful and intelligent people who in turn think you’re pretty rad as well leads to more personal questions about your work. I honestly never know how to answer these things. Even most of my family and friends have yet to read my work, and I maintain a certain embarrassed secrecy about what it is I’m “doing.”

For people who are not writers or who prefer television over books, what I’m doing must sound a little frivolous, unfocused, impossible. And so I hesitate to answer their questions, shy to admit that I’ve yet to be published, because then I would have to explain my own personal rankings of work, evaluations of the journals, how ultimately despite the encouragement of peers and teachers, I don’t feel ready to have a work in print. In other words, I’ve written a dozen stories, valued sections, fallen in love with characters, and broken my own heart, but I haven’t found the work that I recognize as truly my own. Casual conversation would force me to admit that I’ve written thousands of pages by now and don’t consider but maybe five or six of those pages truly good, and certainly not in the context of their wholes. Admitting this makes me feel insane.

But worse than admitting so many futile hours seeking the exact right way to capture an emotion or an image through such an inadequate means as language is explaining to a fellow writer what it is I’m working on. Why? There should be camaraderie and there almost always is, since I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to meet supportive and talented writers throughout my life. But they recognize the slant of my eyes, the trip in my words. I can’t yet name what I’m doing. I’m still unsure. They recognize a will not yet form, and this embarrasses me.

I was talking to an impressive woman last night, middle-school teacher, mother of two small children who just finished her novel and placed in a prestigious contest. Her first instinct was to help. I need to brainstorm my novel, we’ll get together, talk it out. Perhaps I have too many of those beloved characters wreaking havoc on my pages. She had named it a novel. I had called it some beast of a thing that keeps growing. The woman hosting the party came by then and said, Girl, stop trying to tell it what to do. The thing is going to be what it is going to be, and with that she walked off to ignite the kitchen with her infectious laughter.

So, publicly, I’m not saying I am writing a novel, but I’m finally saying that if it should please itself to become one I’m receptive to that frightening reality. What a small admission, right?  I could be admitting adultery or criminal behavior, some juicy personal information these blogs were made for. But instead I’m just admitting that I may or may not be working on a novel. But here is why: the reality of existence for one working a novel looks a lot like this: hours typing away, grunting in frustration, days not writing, days writing again, years worn away on mountains of paper that keep growing, all to discover that no one is interested in the small, strange place where you grew up where a polluted creek glows in the moonlight and cops beat up teenagers just to take their drugs. Or, someone is interested and they now demand that the point of view be switched, that instead of the deeply personal first person choice you agonized over for months, writing and rewriting from first to third to back again, is not the right point of view, and now you are expected to write it again, another year of your life spent in a small, suffocating office, surviving on coffee and sneaking cigarettes and wondering if indeed you do look fatter in some picture someone took of you on the rare occasion you left the house.

My hostess last night compared it to trying to understand the world through a microscope and a telescope at the same time. Why would anyone want to do that?

Advertisement